What lies beneath

What lies beneath

Friday 29 April 2005 19.38 EDT
First published on Friday 29 April 2005 19.38 EDT

"[Robert] Elms has always fancied himself something rotten," wrote Paul Morley in the Sunday Telegraph. "With The Way We Wore he delivers a robust, occasionally self-deprecating defence of his own special understanding of how to achieve specialness through fabulous shoes, tailored shirts and shameless self-promotion." "This is not really a book about clothes," observed Robert Mighall in the Independent on Sunday. "It is about class, adolescence and desire. It is an insightful and passionate chronicle of an important part of British history and identity, as stylish and witty as the finery it obsesses over." "The Way We Wore has been flagged as a Fever Pitch for fashionistas," noted Sukhdev Sandhu in the Daily Telegraph. "But ... I disagree with its conclusion that a triple whammy of MTV, Sunday-supplement overkill and designer-label idolatry has extinguished British street fashion."

"This book is substantial, a brutal study of a brutal topic, mendacity in British politics," thundered Simon Jenkins in the Sunday Times of Peter Oborne's The Rise of Political Lying. "The chief targets are Blair and his courtiers, Peter Mandelson and Alastair Campbell [who] made 'Blairism' synonymous with deviousness and spin." "Blair is not exactly lying," argued Stephen Robinson in the Daily Telegraph. "It is more that he has created around him a little zone of subjective reality." As for Mandelson and Campbell, they were "driven by a zealous self-righteousness and indifference to truth which they thought was justified by the higher need to defend the Project". In the Sunday Telegraph, Gordon Brown's former press secretary Charlie Whelan accused Oborne of being "obsessed with New Labour ... according to Oborne, Margaret Thatcher only ever lied once?"

"[Julia] Briggs suggests that Woolf put personal grief and illness in the service of literary modernism," wrote Gregory Dart in the Financial Times, reviewing Virginia Woolf: An Inner Life. Briggs's main achievement, he said, "is to remind us of Woolf's status as a great feminist modernist, at once a tireless literary experimentalist and a compelling critic of patriarchy." "I find most of her novels in some way unsatisfying," admitted Ferdinand Mount in the Spectator. Woolf was a brilliant diarist and essayist, he conceded, but her fictional characters often speak or think "in this weird, attitudinising, implausible fashion ... like someone inventing a character for themselves in an interminable Bloomsbury after-dinner game".